Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
Operamania
By Philip Gossett
A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera
by Peter Conrad
Poseidon, 383 pp., $9.95
Opera criticism today, when it does not deal with works by a single composer, often links opera to something outside it. It is common for books and articles to have such titles as Literature as Opera, Opera and Ideas, or Romantic Opera and Literary Form[1] and chapter headings like 'Opera as Representation' or 'Opera and Society.'[2] The authors are frequently professors of literature or history and they may include anthropologists and psychologists. Lurking in the background is the specter of Wagner's Oper und Drama, though only Joseph Kerman's classic Opera as Drama[3] boldly adopts Wagner's terms. Kerman's is also one of the few books to insist that 'opera is a type of drama whose integral existence is determined from point to point and in the whole by musical articulation.' Though some of the books by historians and teachers of comparative literature can illuminate important aspects of operatic art, serious opera criticism cannot afford to keep music at bay.
Review, 3231 words
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